5 Articles on Digitality and Fiction

My favorite quote which either gives me great hope or frustrates me a LOT (to be determined): “I would be the first to say that good novelists or screenwriters don’t necessarily make good game writers, but in this case, Mohsin really nailed it and he wrote a story that shows a very deep understanding of interactive storytelling…” (Doctorow).

And in the discussions following, this makes me feel better about my own procrastination: “I’m meant to be revising for some 2nd year medical exams which start on the 28th but fuck it I get so excited by this kind of thing I’m going to follow it all day” (Faustus).

What people are going to say about my final project: “Digital fiction never looked this good ♥” (Runasand).

On copyright. Wow!: “”By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year” (posted by Jayerandom, as qting John Tehranian).

Charles Cumming says, “It was limiting only in the sense that I couldn’t explore character in any great depth or get into the more psychological or emotional sides of the story. Plot was everything. Suspense was everything. It was all about pace and movement. But that in itself was quite exciting. Once I understood the parameters of what Penguin were trying to achieve, I had a lot of fun with it.” This scares me! What does this mean for my own fiction writing in considering this newly digitlized fiction stuff that is happening. I think behind it all is greatness, but can we have literary digitality?